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Welcome to my blog

I hope you enjoy reading my posts, and please leave me a comment. I always enjoy reading them, and will try to visit you in return.

You are welcome to copy any of my designs, as long as you do not take credit for them yourself. I am very happy for you to sell them. If I have used anyone else's design, I always try to give credit where it is due. If I have missed anything, please let me know and I will put things right.

This is intended to be mainly about my crafting stories, as a personal record of what I do. However, I interpret crafting quite widely, not just paper crafting but other things too. I have a butterfly mind and like to change from one thing to another depending on what I feel like on a given day - knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, cards, baking and several others.

Saturday, 21 May 2016

This canvas was one I started at Sazz's (Sally-Ann Moore) class at Nottingham some time ago, but I was never really happy with what I achieved that day. My fault as I was playing with new paints and it did not come off. So it has been haunting me round the house ever since. I painted it black, ready to have another go, but still could not decide what to do.

Now, having had two lessons from Debbie Rock (she has a lot to answer for), I decided to dive in with the micas. The first step was to redo all the stencilled bits, using Sweet Poppy Pearlescent paste and add another stencil to the mix, then gessoed the lot with black. There are four Clarity stencils here, The butterfly tree, the large butterfly annd Jo's Bubbles, with the addition of the new flower swirl (which I love).

I spent an afternoon spraying and rubbing and spraying, then added some glittery bits but that had to wait till the next day till I got decent daylight. A lot of the flowers were created from the airdry clay and mould that Leonie was demoing on Wednesday. I did get a bit carried away, playing with that and ended up with a lot of flowers and leaves. It was fun and I have a stack to use on future pieces. One of those clay flowers is in this second photo with clay leaves added.

As most people know, this is not my normal style, which is why I decided to enter it in this month's Clarity Stamp Challenge. The Clarity stencils which formed the base were perfect for the texture paste.

Sunday, 8 May 2016

This is a recent piece of parchment work I have completed. It was a special commission for a family member for a wedding. I had originally been asked to do a parchment card but eventually I decided that it would be better to mount it on to a canvas board.

The flowers and borders all came from Clarity's Groovi system and just involved moving the parchment around to get all the flowers into the positions I needed. The writing in the centre panel was from the Groovi Club Baby Starter Kit and were the perfect size for this project.

The backing colours were requested to fit in with the wedding themed colours, which, in turn, were from the groom's regimental colours. The parchment is mounted onto amethyst coloured mirri card and then onto a canvas board painted with acryllic chalk paint from Paper Artsy. There is a small amount of pricking and cutting around the central panel.

About Me

My name is Margaret, and I was happily married to Geoff for over 43 years, until his devastatingly sudden death at the beginning of April, 2013. Both our children are now married and have given us lovely grandchildren to play with. After years of having nutty Burmese cats, I now have two even nuttier working cocker spaniels to keep me busy and amused.
I only got started on card making in about 2006. My craft room has now become a craft house, like many others of you out there. Crafting is so addictive but great fun.